World Listening Day 2013: New York City

For World Listening Day 2013, I thought I'd post something a little different from my usual environmental recordings. This piece was recorded from the window of the ACE Hotel, 20W 29th Street, New York City, just before 1am Sunday 24 February 2013. One first pass, it may seem like a typical city soundscape. Traffic. Distant voices. Hum. However, to my ears it was distinctly different to what I was familiar with. I live in a busy city, Sydney, in Australia. I'm used to these sounds. But as I sat there listening to these sounds, the subtle differences in the sounds, the sources of which were all too familiar, from what my ears were accustomed to sounded somehow new. Unique. I guess this taps into the ideas behind World Listening Day, it isn't just the sounds, its what you hear.



You can listen at Soundcloud here.

Blast Furnace Park, Lithgow

Blast Furnace Park is located in Lithgow, NSW (about 2h drive from Sydney). The old blast furnace was constrcuted in the late 1880s and marked the beginning of the iron and steel industry in Australia. The furnace operated until 1928. The remains of the furnace foundations and associated structures remain and parklands, including a small wetland, have been preserved. You can read more about the history of the iron and steel industry in Lithgow here.

This recording was made in late 2012. 




 

Wood, Winter, Hollow

The cold had a certain warmth to it. Worlds, life, among the layers of ice. Complex sounds, alive, found in the darkest rocks, wet with winter’s water. These hollows, rough with age, nature’s hideouts, were the source of inspiration and sounds for the first full-length collaborative effort from Seaworthy (Cameron Webb) and Taylor Deupree.

Webb was plucked from a bushfire and flood-ridden east coast of an Australian summer and deposited via a 20h flight into a New York covered in snow. From wetlands abuzz with wildlife in the Australia to winter’s wooded trails through Pound Ridge, the sonic environments couldn’t have been more different.

Working together in person has been an important point in Deupree’s collaboratinos lately. Much preferring the human interaction and local landscapes over the soulless exchange of sound files over the internet. With this point taken care of the pair struck out in a New York February to a 4,000 acre nature preserve near Deupree’s studio called Ward Pound Ridge, a park rich in history that supports a diverse range of plant and animal life. While the cold of winter kept most of the animals quiet the landscape nonetheless teemed with sounds. The local environment was hit badly by Hurricane Sandy a few months prior and the remnants of broken trees and debris littered much of the woodland area. Deupree and Webb spent three days on the trails recording sounds and images which created direction and purpose for their album which was composed in the evenings in the 12k studio.

The resulting Wood, Winter, Hollow traces a rustic path of the days in the woods with an equally natural soundset fronted by Webb on a nylon string guitar. Bells, sticks, melodica and the occasional analog synthesizer form the sonic backdrop echoing the quiet, but lively sounds of the winter forest. Endemic field recordings, including hydrophones placed in near-frozen streams, became an integral part of the work creating a subtle narrative that places the album in its specific place in time.

The subtle crackle of a slow flowing creek working its way through a cover of ice and frozen leaves. The faint whistle of the pale leaves of the beech tree that defy mother nature by clinging to their tree’s spindling branches against the push of winter winds. The cacophony of whispered raindrops running off infrastructure and hundred year old stone structures. These are the sounds that inspire and infuse Wood, Winter, Hollow. The rawness of winter in a world clinging to fragments of warmth.

For sound samples and ordering details, please visit the 12k website. CD/Download available from June 11 2013.

World Listening Day 2012: East Coast Low

To celebrate World Listening Day 2012, I'm sharing this piece compiled from recordings made in early June when Sydney was soaked by an immense low pressure system that battered the coast with wind, rain and massive surf.

Abandoned Drains

Over the past decade, Hexham Swamp on the NSW coast new Newcastle has been the subject of one of the largest wetland rehabilitation projects in the southern hemisphere. Part of the project has been the reintroduction of tidal flows to the wetland and as part of that process, an old pipelines that once acted as drains have been decomissioned. The old pipes had been discarded onsite and these recordings were made on an extremely windy day from a shaltered space inside the pipes.

Abandoned Drains by seaworthy

Blue Mountains Botanic Garden

Approximately 90min drive from Sydney's CBD, The Blue Mountain Botanic Gardens are located at Mt Tomah. This beautiful region of the Blue Mountains is the perfect location for the Botanic Gardens. Just one part of the gardens is known as "The Jungle". For some history on this area of the gardens:

"The Jungle was originally purchased in 1929 by a group of Sydney businessmen to save the magnificent sassafras and coachwood trees from the timber mill while providing Sydney with a national park to its west. It was opened by the then Governor Admiral Sir Dudley DeChair on 23 March 1929 and the original walk was dedicated to the memory of Sir James Fairfax KBE. However, the Jungle never achieved its destiny as a national park as the Great Depression, coupled with pressure for building funds for the Sydney Harbour Bridge, led in 1934 to the land being resumed by the previous owners, the Charley family.
In 2008, 33 hectares of the original Jungle was purchased by the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust, with the financial support of John and Elizabeth Fairfax and the NSW Government's Environmental Trust. Now part of the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden, Mount Tomah, the Jungle is again in public hands giving Sydneysiders an opportunity to experience and understand Blue Mountains' rainforest."

These recordings were made late in the afternoon on 21 November. While within the rainforest habitats you seem completely isolated, the invasive sound of traffic continues to invade these recordings. However, the diversity of bird calls here more than makes up for it. It would be nice to visit first thing in the morning to make some more recordings.

For more information on the Blue Mountains Botanic Gardens visit their website.

Blue Mountains Botanic Garden by seaworthy

Singing Floodlights

This recording was made with contact mics on floodlight towers at Campbell Park, Russell Lea, NSW, Australia. The towers are relatively narrow and at over 30m high with their large banks of floodlights tend to sway a little once the wind picks up. These recordings were made during a period of particularly strong winds, a common occurance in Sydney during September/October each year. The sounds in these recordings are primarily made from the movement of internal wires/cables as the huge structures sway in the wind. During these recordings, the movement in the lights above was quite dramatic.

Singing Floodlights by seaworthy

Broken Estuary

In Aprill 2011, I was working on the far north coast of NSW. After considerable rainfall, many of the local estuaries that had been cut off from the ocean by an accumulation of sand now spilled across the beach as tannin stained water flowed to the sea. The overflows cut into the beach, creating new creeklike connections. The sounds here are of the fast flowing water across the beach and between debris, chunks of sand falling from the creek's edges into the water and distinct thunder as a new storm front approaches.

Broken Estuary by seaworthy

Site Listening

Make sure you pay a visit to the wonderful Site Listening website for a collection of sounds and locations in QLD compiled by Lawrence English (Room40, 12k, Touch).

Minyon Falls, Nightcap National Park

Nightcap National Park contains extensive areas of lush Gondwana Rainforests and was preserved by a determined group of conservationists in the 1980s. These photos and recordings were made during a brief visit in April 2011 to Minyon Falls. The sound composition here contains a series of recordings made surrounding the creekline leading to the falls themslves. Surrounded by dense forest, there are bird calls (as well as an occasional frog croak) but dominating the recordings are the sounds of the falls themselves that create a background drone running through most of the piece.

Minyon Falls, Nightcap National Park by seaworthy

Drought

Lake Preston – Yalgorup National Park

Yalgorup National Park, located 100m from my front door, protects a chain of 10 lakes of high conservation importance. The park offers refuge to plant numbers of plants and animal species. Its particularly notable for its tuart woodlands, salt marsh communities, ancient thrombolites and international migratory waterbird species.

South Western Australia has undergone one of its hottest summers on record. Before the hot summer months we experienced one of the driest winters on record, with rainfall at approximately 50% below average levels.

As a result the Lake Preston and the surrounding Yalgorup Park are extremely dry. The lake is a barren almost moonscape like environment. I took a walk out on the lake a few days ago to take photos and some field recordings. It struck me on the walk home that 15 years ago this lake was used for waterskiing and sailing but in recent years the lake is dry in summer, devoid of water and filled with the a salty brine smell and the debris of bones, feathers and resilient salt marsh plant species. The sounds in the centre of the lake were limited to my footsteps, the wind and the distant hum of traffic from the nearby highway.

- Matt

Lake preston blogmix by Matt Rösner

Gutters filled with sand

Hydrophone in gutters and sand by seaworthy

Do birds & frogs sing differently in the city?

Wildlife can use sound to communicate in many different ways but, more often than not, they may distinctive sounds to help find a mate. One of the things I've notice while recording in urban wetlands is the large amount of noise pollution caused by traffic, industry and other human activity. I know there is a dramatic reduction in frog calling activity during evenings when the wind is strong. One field trip on the south coast we recorded about 8 species of frog calling on the first night but one the second night the wind was much stronger and we only recorded 2 frog species. How are these animals responding to "human-made" noise?

There has been some media interesting in a recent Melbourne University study that has indicated that urban noise is changing the calls of some bird species. The soon to be published study titled "Geographically pervasive effects of urban noise on frequency and syllable rate of songs and calls in silvereyes (Zosterops lateralis)" by Potvin, Parris & Mulder reports on the adaptation of birds to urban environments by calling at higher frequencies. You can read the abstract here.

It also reminded me of this paper reporting a change in the frequency of frog calls in habitats close to traffic from 2009. That paper reporting on changes in frog calls, "Frogs Call at a Higher Pitch in Traffic Noise" by Parris, Velik-Lord & North is available here Turns out it is one of the same researchers, K Parris, involved in both projects!

I guess what the work of these researchers is showing is that our natural environment can be influenced as much, perhaps, by noise pollution as other forms of pollution. While bird calls may be shifting as a result of learnt behaviours, the change in frogs call may be reflecting an evolutionary shift in animals adapted to urban environments. I'll be keen to follow the continuing work of Parris and her collegues.

Cam

Sand Dunes

Field recordings for "Two Lakes" were made around Termeil and Meroo Lakes. These types of lakes are referred to as Intermittently Closed and Open Lakes and Lagoons (ICOLL). ICOLLs are saline water bodies that have intermittent connection to the ocean with an accumulation of sand blocking water flow from the lake into the ocean. They are fragile ecosystems with the lake system and surrounding wetlands strongly influenced by tidal exchanges (or lack thereof) with the ocean. For more information on ICOLLs and their conservation and management, visit the Wetlandlink website

This short recording was taken from within the grasses on the dunes seperating Meroo Lake and the ocean. The constant rumble of the shoreline waves and windblown vegetation dominate this recording.

Sand Dune by seaworthy